Business

Internet firm lands angel cash

Company utilizes Web to help students study

A Madison company that uses the Internet to help students study more efficiently said Friday it has raised $3.65 million.

StudyBlue Inc. raised the money from individual angel investors led by Will Thorndike, a Boston-based investor who founded Housatonic Partners in 1994, said Becky Splitt, StudyBlue's chief executive officer. Housatonic, a private equity firm, did not participate in the round, Splitt said.

The funding brings to $6.5 million StudyBlue has raised from investors in the last two years, Splitt said.

The company will use the money to improve its software, draw more students as users, "and hopefully create something that feeds on itself," said Steve Wallman, StudyBlue's chairman.

StudyBlue offers an online home for students, with tools for uploading and storing lecture notes, making flashcards, creating quizzes and other features that are available from a laptop, smart phone or other device wherever they choose to study.

Students who use StudyBlue make 90% of their content public, so users can create flashcards using others' notes as well as their own, Wallman said. Wallman is also the founder of Wallman Investment Counsel LLC, a Middleton money management firm that manages $92 million, according to filings with federal securities regulators.

"Education is a pyramid. It's a cinch for the people at the top of the pyramid, but for everybody else, it's hard," Wallman said. "What we're trying to do is capture the behaviors of the top students so we can help the other students follow in their footsteps."

StudyBlue was founded by Christopher Klündt, who graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with degrees in computer science and biomedical engineering. Klündt also is the company's president.

Klündt passed up medical school despite being accepted and instead went to work for Wallman as an investment analyst.

When they stumbled on the idea for a website that would help students, Klündt talked Wallman into providing seed money. It was his first ever start-up investment, Wallman said.

StudyBlue has "hundreds of thousands" of users, primarily from 500 college campuses around the country, Splitt said. Most of the site's content is free to users and supported by advertising. A paid premium area provides enhanced features such as the ability to automatically generate a study guide, she said.

The typical top student - Klündt was one of them, graduating at the top of his UW-Madison class - takes two pages of notes during a lecture, then goes home and types them up to study or make flashcards from, Wallman said. Each lecture turns into about 14 flashcards, he said.

StudyBlue users can make those flashcards on the site, then turn them into true/false and multiple choice tests. The site also recommends what's relevant, advice users can follow or ignore, Splitt said.

"What is compelling and unique with StudyBlue's platform is its focus on improving how students learn, with academic integrity," John Wiley, former UW-Madison chancellor and a member of the StudyBlue board, said in a statement.